The Psychopath in Power
THE descent of Rudolf Hess from the air on May toth, 1941, was perhaps the most fantastic event of the war ; indeed, it had been substantially anticipated in actual fiction by Mr. Peter Fleming. It was fantastic, also, in the precise and technical psychological sense, for it was the outcome of the fantasies of a disordered minfl in many respects detached from reality. The discovery that Hess was mentally abnormal diminished the immediate political importance of his self-imposed mission, but on the long view it enhanced its significance for the historian, the sociologist and the statesman, for it afforded an opportunity for psychiatrists to study over a long period of time a psychopathic personality who had helped to build Nazi power in Germany and had achieved there a position second only to Hitler himself. Owing largely to the vision of Dr. Rees that opportunity was fully taken, and the result of the investigations carried out by the team of psychiatrists under his direction is now available in this fascinating narrative which begins with Hess's landing and ends with his sentence at Nuremberg. The book con- tains extracts from reports made upon him from time to time by the psychiatrists in charge of him and the arguments as to his fitness to plead at Nuremberg, and reproduces the reports on his mental condition presented to the tribunal by the specialists of the
four Allied nations who examined him. The layman will have no difficulty in understanding the greater part of the book, at least in appreciating the facts. Their evaluatign is less easy, for even the psychiatrists found Hess a difficult and at times a baffling problem, and those who have had no direct experience of hysterics and psychopaths may well find it hard to understand how behaviour apparently so conscious and purposive could be the product of mental disease and not simply malingering.
During the four years of Hess's captivity in this country he suffered from delusions of persecution. He believed that noises were deliberately made to shake his nerves, that he was being slowly poisoned, and even that those in charge of him were being poisoned. He made two attempts at suicide, and he suffered from periods of loss of memory. Nevertheless, all the experts who examined him at Nuremberg agreed that " at the moment " he was " not insane in the strict sense." All the Allied psychiatrists were unanimous that his loss of memory was hysterical and genuine, and that his delusions of persecution were a symptom of a psychopathic personality. The tribunal, it will be remembered, had just heard the arguments of his counsel that his loss of memory rendered him unfit to plead, when Hess himself startled the court by declaring that he had been simulating the amnesia. As this book shows, Hess did nothing at Nuremberg that he had not done before, and Dr. Gilbert, the prison psychiatrist, is convinced that the loss of memory was genuine and that his confession of malingering was an invention.
In one of the most interesting, and technically the most difficult, chapters there is a discussion of Hess's mental abnormalities in relation to the psychological origins of the Nazi movement in the national mind of Germany. It is here and in even wider implications that the importance of Hess lies Historians in the past have tended to treat political ideas as subjects for rational and ethical judgements existing in a kind of platonic.vacuum, detached from those who beget and those who adopt them. Of course, ideas do possess this in- dependent vitality ; but during this century psychology has learned, and is now striving to teach, that many ideas can be fully understood only as the outcome of the heredity, childhood experiences and un- conscious tendencies, as well as of the reason, of thbse who hold them. For example, Rousseau's teaching and its influence on the French Revolution cannot be fully appreciated except by those who realise that Rousseau, like Hess, was a psychopathic personality who suffered from ideas of persecution. Indeed, it is in times of unrest and revolution that psychopathic personalities come to the fore, as Dickens knew when in Barnaby Rudge, anticipating Nazi Germany, he made the eccentric Lord George Gordon choose for his lieutenants an aggressive psychopath, a sadist and a mental defective. Kretschmer, the eminent German psychiatrist, writing before Hitler came to power, said: " The psychopaths are always there, but in cool times of peace we give medical reports on them, and in times of social fever—they are our masters." As the authors of this book say : " It is for all of us a duty to study and comprehend the nature of such men. It is important to see how morbid fantasies can activate political conduct of far-reaching importance."
W. RIJSSFLI. BRAIN.
Previous page
